Web-based applications typically use a web browser to support their execution. Many web-based applications use, for example, Internet Explorer to support their execution. These web-based applications are required to be tested against their specified functionalities in order to verify that they will execute as intended. For large web-based applications that have many lines of code, automated testing is preferable because automated testing can save substantial labor as compared to manual testing.
To automate the testing of web-based applications, an automated testing tool can be written using the COTS (commercial off the shelf) tools that are available in the market. Some examples of available COTS tools are Rational Robot, Rational functional tester from IBM-Rational™, Win Runner, QTP from Mercury Interactive, QA Center from Compuware, etc.
However, there are several problems in using existing COTS tools. For example, licenses to these COTS tools are not readily available as a practical matter, the cost of securing a license is very high, support for third party controls that are written to increase the functionality of web applications are not available to any practical extent in the existing COTS tools, deployment of such controls requires a separate license and patch to run the corresponding scripts, remote execution of these scripts also requires a separate license, maintenance of these scripts is poor, a propriety scripting language cannot be used across the tools, user interface related functions are not available, and a dedicated machine is required to run the scripts.
Moreover, existing COTS tools have only a limited set of operations that can be performed for the testing of web-based applications, which makes practical automation of application testing more difficult to achieve. Therefore, in order to increase the testing capability with available COTS tools, proxies (external DLL's) could be written in order to implement operations not supported by the COTS tools. A DLL is a dynamic link library of functions that can be called by a program when the program is run, rather than being linked to it when it is compiled. A DLL file is denoted with a .dll file extension.
These proxy functions could be called through existing COTS tools in order to perform the proxy operation and, in many cases, a user would have to write a great many proxies in order to achieve the required operations. Unfortunately, reliance on the COTS tool to call these proxies functions would mean that the problems associated with using existing COTS tools discussed above would not be avoided, and would be particularly troublesome in those applications requiring a testing tool that relies on many proxies.
Furthermore, because dedicated machines are required to run a test script supported by a COTS tool, the dedicated machine typically cannot perform any parallel processing while scripts are running since execution of the test script takes the control of mouse and the keyword, which prevents any interaction between the user and the dedicated machine.
The invention as claimed below overcomes one or more of these or other problems. In one embodiment, the machine executing test script is able to perform parallel activities even while the test script is executing on that machine.